Opinions expressed by ukbusinessupdates.com contributors are their own.
Marc Benioff, co-founder and co-CEO of Salesforce, recently shipped a company-wide Slack post complaining about the low productivity of recent hires during the pandemic and asking, “Aren’t we building tribal knowledge with new hires with no office culture?” Salesforce offers employees a high degree of flexibility: teams and their leaders can choose the work arrangements that best fit their needs. But does such flexibility threaten the development and integration of recently recruited junior staff?
That is a concern expressed by many companies I recommend about the transition to fixed hybrid working arrangements. They acknowledge that research shows that the workforce is more productive work remotely, but worry that this may not apply to junior employees who have not yet learned the company’s systems, processes and practices. They are also concerned about the professional growth and cultural integration of junior employees. After all, the future of any organization depends on developing its junior staff into future leaders.
Many leaders therefore join Benioff in expressing serious reservations about a flexible hybrid model. Instead, they advocate a return to the office as a way to address such concerns and revive what Benioff called an “office culture.”
I tell such leaders that their concerns are real and need to be addressed. However, there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Flexibility helps improve productivity and retention while reducing costs; it is important and achievable to find a win-win approach that preserves these benefits while promoting the development of junior staff.
In fact, a full-time return to the office is likely to have a negative effect on junior staff, not a positive effect. According to the ADP Research Institute report, “People at Work 2022: A Global Workforce View”, Gen Z is the most likely age group to say that “if my employer insisted that I return to my workplace full-time, I would consider another looking for a job”, at age 71 %. In contrast, 56% of those aged 45-54 said they would consider looking for another job.
Related: How Has Remote Work Affected Our Relationships With Other Employees? The findings of this study will surprise you.
Instead, the solutions I work on with clients have a more focused approach that is adapted to the needs of junior employees. It means newer employees are more likely to come to the office, but not just randomly: they won’t pick up a company’s culture and work habits by osmosis, especially given that more experienced staff won’t be coming in as often as junior staff.
What is needed is a well-considered, intentional and structured program to facilitate their development and integration into the corporate culture, while maintaining flexible hybrid working arrangements. This policy is separate from a company’s onboarding program, but should build on and complement it so that junior employees transition seamlessly from the onboarding program to the development and integration program for the first few years in the first few weeks.
An important part of a hybrid development and integration program is on-the-job training. Such training mainly takes the form of senior personnel responding immediately to questions and concerns of recent hires: showing them how to perform the duties associated with the position, guiding them in best practices and unwritten rules and standards, and educating them with key internal and external stakeholders. Similarly, such training involves senior staff observing the performance of junior staff and proactively giving them feedback and suggestions for improvement.
Fortunately, such on-the-job training can easily be done in a small group, with one senior employee helping to train six to eight junior employees. Senior employees must coordinate schedules with junior employees to come to the office on the same days and then work in the same open office space.
All employees work on their individual tasks. If a recent employee has a question, they ask it, and the veteran employee will answer and explain the context; this ensures that the whole group gets the benefit of the explanation, without the senior staffer having to repeat it for each person in a one-on-one training environment. In addition, the senior member of staff will occasionally walk around to check on the tasks of junior staff and to guide and coach them where necessary. Again, this helps the whole group learn how to perform this task.
These types of activities hinder the efficiency of senior staff members and should be viewed as a service to the company in their performance reviews. But this barrier is relatively minor, due to a one-to-many dynamic where many recent hires are taught at once. No one should be overburdened with training: this task should be divided between a number of senior staffers who are known as good on-the-job trainers. It is helpful for junior employees to receive on-the-job training from a variety of senior employees rather than just one person; recent hires gain multiple perspectives and tactics for achieving work results while also learning about and connecting with different networks and stakeholders within a company.
As part of the development and integration program, it is also useful to provide formally coaching for newer employees. Most mentoring should take place in the office, as it’s easier to have conversations where recent hires can be vulnerable and admit a lack of confidence face-to-face, rather than through video conferencing.
Make sure there is one senior employee from the junior colleague’s direct team. The senior person’s goal within their own team is to assist the person with on-the-job learning specific to the team’s tasks and understanding team dynamics. Also add two from outside the team. One is from the junior staff business unit and the other is from another unit. At least one must be in a different geographic area if the company is large enough. These two mentors will be needed to solve one of the most important issues revealed by research on corporate culture in hybrid work: the decrease in cross-functional connections about the staff.
Having three mentors reduces the burden on each, allowing encounters with each once or twice a month. This makes such formal mentoring easy to handle for experienced employees.
What about the days when recent employees work remotely? Leverage digital coworking to facilitate on-the-job learning through virtual settings and promote effective team collaboration. It involves team members working on their own tasks for an hour or two a day during a video conference call with their teammates.
To start a digital coworking session, team members must first join a video conference call. During this call, each team member should share their plans to work on their own tasks for the session, then mute their microphone while keeping the speakers on, with video optional. Then team members work independently on their own tasks while still being able to communicate with each other by turning on their microphones when they have a question or comment. More experienced team members would then respond to the question, including using screen sharing or a virtual whiteboard to demonstrate how to complete a task. Digital coworking helps to replicate the experience of working with colleagues in a shared office space, which is useful for on-the-job training for junior executives.
Related: Once a skeptic, Elon Musk is now embracing these divisive workplace policies — and you should too.
Benioff is correct when he mentions the challenges of developing junior staff in a hybrid environment. Still, the solution doesn’t involve sending everyone to the office to ensure an “office culture.” Rather than a broad approach that sacrifices flexibility, and its benefits for retention, productivity and cost savings, my clients find it helps to have a narrow, focused approach that addresses the problem. The solution is a structured program that smoothly transitions recent hires from onboarding in the first few weeks to integration and development over the first few years, with on-the-job training and mentoring in the office, along with digital coworking.
